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Three
summers ago I received a phone call from a radio station
in Bogotá. On the other end, a female journalist
seemed excitable and her voice conveyed a pleading
tone. It is hard to mistake an elongated ‘please’
for anything else. Three Irish men had been arrested
in Colombia and were being accused of having illicit
links with FARC guerrillas. Understandably, she wanted
the scoop for her station and felt her endeavours
would be beefed up a bit if she could add an ‘authentic’
voice to the narrative. Having previously done South
American broadcasting, the task seemed straightforward
enough for me.
She
wanted to know what the IRA was doing in Colombia.
I probed her as to how we could be sure it was the
IRA. Yes, one of the men at least was a republican
well-known to everybody but Sinn Fein seemingly; and
he had functioned as a senior party education officer.
The one time I had spoken with him was at a 1990s
ard fheis and the only thing we discussed was education,
or the thwarting of it within the party. A decade
later, he had just left a demilitarised zone controlled
by FARC which had been ceded to the guerrillas by
the then Colombian president Andres Pastrana who was
looking at ways of developing a peace deal. So while
the detained man’s voice had not yet managed
to make it into public discourse explaining why he
was in the conflict riven South American state, at
the time it seemed plausible to me that he had been
there for what he later claimed – looking at
the peace process. The interviewing journalist, while
probably not convinced, was happy enough to have a
voice even if it was highly perspectival. Despite
the plausibility I wasn’t entirely persuaded
myself but had no way of knowing and did not want
to say anything that would enhance the potential risks
facing the men detained. My sympathies invariably
lie with the jailed, never the jailers.
Their
innocence or guilt did not primarily concern me. It
still doesn’t. For having wreaked terrorist havoc
in South America, it was easy to argue that there
were other more suitable candidates to spend decades
locked in a Bogotá jail than these three; Henry
Kissinger heading the queue. In a country with an
atrocious human rights record, it is straightforward
enough to think of worse things than helping guerrillas
fight the government.
Although
the Irish Times has argued why the three men were
in Colombia in the first place has still not been
satisfactorily explained, this is more a political
concern than a judicial one. Legally, the men had
only to remain stum and the onus after that was on
the prosecution to prove its case. As far back as
2002 it was clear that such provability was determined
to remain elusive. The verdict, when pronounced, merely
reflected the evidence before the court. The defence
case was much the stronger.
What
helped persuade many that the men had a case to answer
was not the shoddy evidence presented against them
but that Sinn Fein, true to form, immediately sought
to lie about any links to the arrested men. Worse
still, reports of party representatives telling US
officials and media people in off-the-record briefings
that it was all the work of a Marxist on the army
council who ‘Gerry can’t control’,
hardly tipped the credibility scales in favour of
the account offered by the arrested men. If the latter
were, as claimed, out examining the peace process
and nothing else, then all critics and adversaries
could be told to get lost and there was no need for
the party to wax flabbergasted. But as the Sinn Fein
leadership lie so routinely about events, a suspicious
public suspects the party of something underhand even
when it is wholly blameless.
In
Ireland the verdict has been treated with the usual
congenital instinctive responses. Sinn Fein, always
comfortable when sporting a brass neck, will now seek
to exploit the return of the men, greeting them with
open arms despite having done a St Peter on them three
years ago. The staggering in sentences suggests that
the Colombian judiciary is seeking to deny Sinn Fein
any propaganda victory which may mean the three men
do not arrive in Ireland as a group. The unionists,
for their part, never learn and have been spewing
venom about the acquittal. Much better, in their view,
had the men been shot when arrested and then all this
pesky business of human rights and due process would
just go the Argentinean way - up against a wall alongside
those about to be despatched. Unionism seems both
PR and justice blind; always willing to play by the
rules until wrong footed. When things don’t go
its way it reverts to type. David Trimble hits out
at human rights agencies and Pat Finucane suddenly
becomes an IRA member despite all the evidence to
the contrary.
And
as if to confirm nationalist scepticism about unionist
intentions, the unionists had nothing to say when
13 British cavers, many of them British military,
were found in Mexico in march, forcing the country's
leader Vincente Fox to ask the British Government
to explain what its soldiers had been doing in Mexican
caves. Under the country’s law a special visa
for scientific explorations is required and foreign
military exercises are outlawed. The cavers' refusal
of local assistance coupled with demands that British
specialists be flown in to rescue them led to speculation
that the group had been exploring the caves on a secret
military mission. But none of that matters –
there is no mileage to be squeezed from it in the
battle to kick opponents out of Stormont.
While
the three Irish republicans were found not guilty
in a court of law, Sinn Fein has already been judged
complicit in the court of political interests where
legalities play second fiddle to geo-strategic considerations.
That the US played a role in building the case against
the arrested men will ensure that. And there is no
‘get out of jail free’ card in the deck
shuffled on the bench there. There will be no appeal
against the judgement of Mitchell Reiss.
James
Davis suggested in Counterpunch that it may
be even more difficult for Sinn Fein's leadership
to explain why, were it not for a grassroots family
campaign, the three men might be looking at a very
long time away from home.
Don't
hold your breath waiting on answers.
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