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It
was a strange coincidence to be reading about the
1980s disappearances of ETA activists Joxean Lasa
and Joxi Zabala, perpetrated by members of the Spanish
security services with government approval, just as
Jean McConville was being buried for the last time.
On this occasion it was not in the preferred manner
of totalitarianism determined to do its dirty work
in the dark. The West Belfast turn out for her funeral
procession was remarkably small by comparison with
that of Tom Williams a couple of years ago, whose
body, like that of Mrs McConville, had been exhumed
from an unmarked grave. His funeral was organised
by republicans. Given their skill in such matters
it is hardly surprising that a substantial turnout
ensued as a mark of respect for the young Kashmir
Road IRA volunteer hanged by the Unionist government.
A
report from the time in An Phoblacht/Republican
News conveys the atmosphere of the time:
By
11am, the chapel was full to capacity, many people
standing along the aisles, filling every available
space and still the crowd spilled out into the street
and beyond. And everyone was there. Family, friends,
and comrades, young and old. Contemporaries of Tom
Williams, now in their 60s and 70s years, a poignant
reminder of the passage of time between Tom's execution
and this day's funeral mass. Joe Cahill, Tom's cell
mate and John Oliver, sentenced to death with Tom
but later reprieved. Madge McConville, who had been
arrested with Tom, Greta McGlone, Billy McKee, Eddie
Keenan and perhaps least known, Nell Morgan, Tom's
girlfriend at the time of his death.
Members
of Belfast's National Graves Association, who campaigned
so long and hard for Tom Williams' remains to be
released from Crumlin Road jail, attended - Liam
Shannon, Tony Curry, Ann Murray and Frank Glenholmes.
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams was accompanied
by senior members of the party and local Councillors
Tom Hartley, Ita Grey, Michael Brown, Michael Ferguson
and Belfast Deputy Mayor Marie Moore.
Nationalists
and republicans, too young to know Tom personally
but who have grown up with the story of Tom Williams
on their lips. School children who interrupted their
studies to pay tribute to a brave Irish patriot
and younger still, a woman comforts a crying toddler,
beyond understanding now but one day she will listen
to her mother recount this moment.
Republicans'
ability to organise only goes so far in explaining
such a public display of emotion for the return of
Tom Williams. On occasion when Sinn Fein have tried
to mobilise bodies against the suspension of elections
or the Stormont Assembly, few people bothered themselves
coming out. There was a strong emotional sentiment
attached to Tom Williams which would have brought
people out independent of organisation. Unfortunately,
this was absent for Jean McConville. There was no
visible campaigning by republicans aimed at pressurising
people not to attend. West Belfast simply and regrettably
passed its own judgement and voted with its feet.
What
makes a protest movement that claims to be progressive
engage in war crimes? If it just comes with the turf
that war moves combatants onto then the chasm that
demarcates the legitimate force of those seeking justice
from the illegitimate violence of those denying the
same, is narrowed. Ends and means become decoupled
in a process that blurs the necessary distinctions
between the opposing camps that allow us to consider
waging a just war to begin with. Suppression of the
truth becomes an imperative as the public are manipulated
into blind support or passive acquiescence. US General
William Westmoreland explained the logic: 'without
censorship, things can get terribly confused in the
public mind.' And there was censorship in the case
of the secret graves - republicans simply suppressed
the truth about their existence.
Nor
is it completely persuasive to put war crimes down
to the ruthless malevolence of the person in charge,
whatever their ambition, penchant for vileness and
dark arts or admiration for the tactics of Pinochet,
Viola and Gonzales. There must exist a wider culture
of tolerance toward such activity both within the
organisation responsible and in the broader community
in which it is situated, or at least a lack of reflection
which allows such crimes to go by default. Why else
did West Belfast embrace Tom Williams and maintain
its distance from Jean McConville?
Fear
of retribution from on high for refusing to participate
in war crimes explains little also. The experience
of Wermacht troops on the Eastern Front during World
War Two produces not one example of a soldier being
disciplined for refusing to perform the hideous. Yet
enough did. And the IRA was never the type of organisation
which forced its volunteers to kill, even in circumstances
where the leadership could stand over its operations.
Because a leadership may lead, it does not negate
the complicity of those who either consciously or
blindly follow.
Sitting
in the dock of Belfast Crown Court during a supergrass
trial in 1983, ignoring the boring legal waffle that
all present are expected to endure, myself and one
of those in the dock alongside me were discussing
- not unreasonably given that one had us up in court
- the question of what sanctions to employ against
informers. Despite having been wrenched from his home
and family life on the basis of the uncorroborated
word of a 'paid perjurer' as we were robotically expected
to call them or 'converted terrorist' as the authorities
would ridiculously have us to believe, he was very
flexible in his thinking measured against my rigidity.
He felt 'executing' them was basically brutal and
amounted to little other than punishing people for
human weakness. I was dismissive, insisting that none
should be spared. How else could we protect the organisation
of which we were a part unless we instilled massive
fear in anyone considering compromising it by agreeing
to work for the other side? It was not as if they
did not know the score or the consequences.
Some
time later, perhaps sparked off as a result of a body
being discovered which had been disappeared a number
of years earlier, myself and a senior IRA figure in
the H-Blocks debated the merits of disappearing people.
I felt it was legitimate on the grounds that the uncertainty
of an informer's fate would act as a powerful deterrent
in the mind of anyone thinking of becoming one. It
was as if my previous reading about Argentina or Chile
had bounced off my consciousness. War crimes were
something committed by others but not by us. There
was no consideration for the turmoil families are
put through. Perhaps it takes us to have children
ourselves before we come to fully contemplate the
devastating void that await those who lose one. For
his part, the senior IRA member totally opposed the
practice, feeling, amongst other things, that for
any deterring effect to come into being people had
to be fully aware of what the deterrent actually was
instead of being allowed to hold out the possibility
that the guilty person had merely gone abroad as indeed
some of the disappeared were rumoured to have done.
After listening to him, coupled with much reflection,
I changed my mind and came to the conclusion that
the secret grave was an abhorrent practice that ran
freedom struggle dangerously close to being on a par
with those intent on maintaining the status quo. Within
the prison, during the normal run of the mill discussion
with friends, I expressed the view that the IRA should
disclose the whereabouts of the disappeared. The only
objection I met came in the form of 'if we knew where
they were'.
Change
may come but slowly, although that hardly absolves
me from having approved of the practice to begin with.
It was as much a war crime when I favoured it as it
was one after I had changed course on the issue. So
there is no Chinese wall that ethically segregates
us from those leaders who ordered such obscenities.
In terms of culpability we differ from them only by
degree not kind. The type of tolerance or approval
that I displayed was one less constraining finger
on the shoulder of leaders blinded or indifferent
to the moral swamp they were sinking into.
Yesterday
Martin McGuinness claimed that there was an IRA code
of honour that he wished to respect and was not prepared
to violate. A valid point. But it is a strange code
that cannot find it within itself to preclude war
crimes. 'Men of Honour' have a history of performing
the most dishonourable of things. Kevin Myers invariably
rubs republicans up the wrong way with his caustic
comments. But on this occasion his is a pill we should
swallow unaided by sweeteners. For him, the secret
grave fate of Jean McConville ‘was a uniquely
abominable crime, abominable in its intent, abominable
in its planning, abominable in its outcome, in all
its squalid detail: all as planned, all as intended.’
Just like Bloody Sunday - although Kevin Myers didn’t
say that.
There
are some republicans who continue not to see the killing
of Jean McConville as a war crime, perhaps a majority.
It is their belief that the legitimacy of the cause
automatically extends to the measures used to advance
it. When asked if rape during war - somewhat less
a violation than the secret grave - could not then
be justified on similar grounds they gravitate towards
ellipitical reasoning: for some it was a mistake made
as part of a learning curve. There is still a tendency
to think that only the other side can do wrong; that
the architect of Jean McConville’s secret grave
occupies a moral plateau well above that on which
perches Augusto Pinochet.
Such
thinking might find it worthwhile to absorb the words
of Ignacio Gordillo, a Spanish prosecutor who told
the families of Joxean Lasa and Joxi Zabala that ‘justice
acts equally for everyone: for those that killed your
brothers and for those that may have died through
the actions of your brothers.’ When the state
is involved in murder justice rarely works out like
that. But why should republicans, through dubious
logic and moral glaucoma, aid it in frustrating just
outcomes?
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