Léargas By Gerry Adams
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Collusion:
Getting rid of unwanted members of the public
Lethal
Allies by Anne Cadwallader
The use of collusion by the British
state in the north of Ireland is a well-established fact. The historical
connection between unionist paramilitarism, the RUC and B Specials made it easy
for the British. The northern state was born out of partition and the use and
threat of violence by unionist political leaders. Many of those who founded the
RUC and the various armed Special Police Groups, including the B Specials,
which existed then were former members of the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) – an
armed paramilitary organisation.
When the British Army came back
onto the streets of Derry and Belfast in 1969 many of its officers and soldiers
were fresh from the killing fields of Aden and Oman and some had served in
Kenya and Cyprus and Malaya during the years of conflict in those places in the
1950s and early 60’s.
They brought with them the
techniques of torture; of counter-gangs; of propaganda, and media and political
manipulation that they had used there. Foremost among its advocates was Frank Kitson.
He argued that to win against a guerrilla enemy which had the support of its
community or at the very least a significant proportion of its community, the
government, the law, the judiciary and the media all had to be reshaped and
moulded to suit the aim of defeating the enemy.
Kitson wrote: ‘The fundamental
concept is the working of the triumvirate, civil, military and police, as a
joint and integrated organisation from the highest to the lowest level of
policy making, planning and administration.’
Kitson rationalised the use of
death squads and the corruption of justice: ‘Everything done by a government
and its agents in combating insurgency must be legitimate. But this does not
mean that the government must work within exactly the same set of laws during
an emergency as existed beforehand. The law should be used as just another
weapon in the government’s arsenal, in which case it becomes little more than a
propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public.’
What did all of this mean in
practice? In the early years of the ‘troubles’ it meant the British Army
forging a new unionist paramilitary organisation – the Ulster Defence
Association – out of many small neighbourhood groups. It meant watching columns
of masked UDA men in their thousands parade in paramilitary uniform through the
streets of Belfast escorted by the RUC and British Army. It meant an increase
in sectarian killings.
The purpose of this was to frighten
the nationalist community into rejecting the IRA; to drag that organisation
into a sectarian war; and to make it easier for the British to present the
conflict internationally as ‘mindless sectarian criminality’. It also allowed
for the state to dispose of ‘unwanted members of the public.’
The history of those early years is
writ large the use of spies and spooks and counter gangs by the British through
organisations like the Military Reaction Force and the RUC Special Branch.
Later additional forces like the Force Research Unit and the Special Air
Service and others were brought to play by the Brits.
Successive British government’s
rejected the accusation of collusion. With some honourable exceptions most
media acquiesced to this. Unionists politicians then and today still deny its
existence despite the abundance of evidence.
In 2006 an Independent
International Panel on Collusion into Sectarian Killings produced a detailed
109-page report. It followed a careful examination of 25 cases of unionist
paramilitary violence between 1972 and 1977 in which 76 people were killed. The
Panel found that in 24 cases involving 74 killings there was evidence of
collusion involving the RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment.
Launching the report Douglas
Cassel, a human rights professor from the American University of Notre Dame,
said he had been shocked at the extent of state collusion in the killings the
team had investigated.
The following year the then Police
Ombudsman Nuala O Loan published a report detailing how the RUC Special Branch
knowingly colluded with a “serial killer” – Mark Haddock – providing him with
cover, protecting him from prosecution and paying him at least £80,000 for his
services as an agent. Special Branch agents operated outside the law and
Special Branch officers covered up their crimes.
The investigation directly linked
Haddock with the murders of ten people and cites credible evidence to link him
with further murders, shootings, beatings and bomb attacks as well as a
catalogue of other crimes including drug dealing, extortion, intimidation and
criminal damage.
Throughout it all, Haddock enjoyed
the full support of his Special Branch handlers who not only continued to pay
him but also increased his wages. The report found a ‘pattern of work by
certain officers within Special Branch designed to ensure that Informant 1 and
his associates were protected from the law’.
And then there is the case of human
rights lawyer Pat Finucane about which I have written many times before. The
British are so concerned by the potential of this one case to expose the lie
that collusion was not an instrument of institutional and official government
policy that they reneged on a commitment at Weston Park in 2001 to hold an enquiry.
But the issue of collusion will not
disappear. It has left behind too many victims, their families and questions
unanswered. And now truth has a new champion with the publication of ‘Lethal
Allies – British collusion in Ireland’ by Anne Cadwallader.
Anne who is a case worker with the
Pat Finucane Centre has spent three years researching the deaths of 120
citizens who were killed between 1972 and 1978. ‘Lethal Allies’ chronicles the
extent of collusion between unionist paramilitaries and the RUC and UDR in that
six year period in the 1970’s and it provides a significant new body of
information and evidence about the extent of collusion at that time.
It contains significant new
evidence relating to 120 sectarian killings, including the Dublin and Monaghan
bombs which claimed 33 lives, that occurred during a relatively short period in
the 1970s. The reports from the Historical Enquiries Team, which have never
been seen before, provide a significant insight into the role of the RUC and
UDR in sectarian killings.
The Pat Finucane centre has also
added substantial new evidence through its careful research in the files
available in the British national archives in Kew Gardens in London and
elsewhere and extensive interviews with victim’s families have also produced
new information.
The book makes difficult reading.
Page after page records the death of a loved one and the brutal circumstances
in which their lives were taken. But page after page also reports the depth of
RUC and UDR direct and indirect involvement in most of these deaths.
There are many cases that stand
out. But the bomb attack on the Rock Bar, Granemore, in mid Armagh, provides
one of the clearest examples of collusion at work. Late on June 5 1976 three
men wearing masks pulled up in a car outside of it. They shot one man and
seriously wounded one man Michael McGrath who was standing outside. They placed
a bomb outside and fired indiscriminately into the building. Only the detonator
exploded and no one else was injured.
All of those involved in this
attack were serving members of the RUC. ‘Lethal Allies’ methodically strips
away the connections in this and in case after case and reveals the extent of
RUC and UDR involvement all of these murders.
But it goes further than that it
also exposes the degree to which the institutions of the state, including the
DPP and the judiciary colluded in the covering up and shielding of those
involved in these actions. When the three RUC officers were eventually arrested
and brought to court, along with several others, the serious charge of
attempted murder relating to the Rock Bar attack were dropped.
Michael McGrath was not called as a
witness nor were any of the other people in the Rock Bar. Two of the three were
given suspended sentences and the third, Constable William McCaughey, who had
been convicted several weeks earlier of the sectarian murder of William
Strathearn, was sentenced to seven years to run concurrently with his
conviction for the killing of Strathearn.
The Lord Chief Justice Lowry
tellingly remarked: ‘All of the accused have admitted their offences and all
of them have acted wrongly or emotionally under the same powerful motives, in
one case the mortal danger of their service and in the other the feeling that
more than ordinary police work was needed and justified to rid the land of the
pestilence which has been in existence.’
In the days since the book has been
published a succession of unionist politicians and former RUC officers have
denied, denied, denied. There is no surprise in this. Anne Cadwallader records
in her book that when Harvard historian Caroline Elkins reported on events in
Kenya the British first denied that any abuses had taken place then ‘when
presented with the evidence, blamed the beatings, hangings, torture and forced
removals on “bad apples”.’
‘Duplicity at its finest,’
she called it.
That phrase of ‘bad apples’
and others like ‘renegade officers’ have been used often in the past. It
was trotted out to excuse the torture of detainees in Castlereagh and Gough
Barracks and Strand Road in the late 1970s. It is being used again in recent
days. Once more it is about trying to distance the British political system
from any complicity in what occurred. However, the extent of collusion and its
cover-up; the fact that British politicians knew of its existence and did
nothing to prevent it and the refusal to hold the Pat Finucane enquiry are all
evidence of collusion.
This is perhaps best summed up by
Anne Cadwallader in her conclusion. She writes, “The inescapable fact,
established beyond doubt by these events, is that successive British
governments and their law enforcement agencies entered into a collusive
counter-insurgency campaign with loyalist paramilitaries. It was thoroughly
unethical – and it failed dismally. It was also illegal under international
law.”
In October 2011 the then British
Secretary of State Owen Patterson stood in the British Parliament and admitted that the British State colluded with Loyalist
gunmen in Pat’s murder.
On the same day David
Cameron told the Finucane family that there would be no inquiry into Pat
Finucane’s death just a review of the papers.
Patterson’s words
were part of a damage limitation exercise. The British hoped it would silence
the Finucane family. It didn’t work. Moreover a British Minister, on behalf of
the British Prime Minister, was admitting that his predecessors had
participated in a criminal action.
The British government should move
immediately to establish the inquiry into the Pat Finucane killing which it
signed up for at Weston Park and has reneged on. And it should engage
positively in the debate around truth, legacy and reconciliation matters which
thus far it has obstructed and frustrated.
Sinn Féin Mountmellick – Serving The Community
