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Tag: 1972
Child murder, torture and sexual abuse by British troops covered up by government, report alleges | The Independent
There can be no amnesty for British troops, speaker tells Bloody Sunday event
An amnesty for soldiers will not be accepted by the families of those who died in the Ballymurphy Massacre, a Bloody Sunday commemoration has heard.
A special Mass dedicated to the memory of the 14 people who died after Paratroopers opened fire on civilians in Derry’s Bogside on January 31, 1972, was celebrated at St Mary’s Church, Creggan, on Friday.
Wreaths were laid at the Bloody Sunday Memorial in Rossville Street following a prayer service attended by the relatives of those killed.
Several hundred people took part in a March for Justice organised by the Bloody Sunday March Committee.
This culminated at Free Derry Corner where Eileen McKeown whose father, Joseph Corr, was shot dead by paratroopers in the Ballymurphy massacre in August 1971, addressed the crowd.
She said that after 46 years the Ballymurphy families were now preparing for the inquests in September into the deaths of 10 of those killed in Ballymurphy, and warned they would reject any proposal to introduce an amnesty for soldiers.
Ms McKeown said: “In September, at last, the inquests into the deaths of 10 of our loved ones get under way.
“This is another significant achievement that took a long time to come but finally, direct result of many years of hard work from families, we will have our day in court.
“It will provide us with a legal process to uncover the facts about how our loved ones died.
“The attempts by the British Government to introduce an amnesty for British soldiers is totally unacceptable to the Ballymurphy families.
“This Thursday a delegation of Ballymurphy families went to Westminster to make our views known about this and we told the Chairperson of the Defence Select Committee, Julian Lewis, that an amnesty in any guise will never be acceptable to the families of the Ballymurphy Massacre.
“This is yet another attempt by the British state to stand in the way of truth and justice. And for what? To win a few votes.”
A recent defence committee report favoured a controversial statue of limitations for members of the Armed Forces, coupled with a truth-recovery process to help families bereaved during the Troubles.
However, the report, published last month, stopped short of recommending the proposal for all sides during the Troubles as it “would be for the next government to decide”.
The concept of an amnesty has gained traction among a number of Westminster backbenchers, who claim recent prosecutions of former British soldiers were tantamount to a “witch-hunt”. However, prosecutors and police in Northern Ireland insist such allegations simply do not stand up to scrutiny, with a breakdown of figures showing no disproportionate focus on ex-security force members.
Meanwhile, the Museum of Free Derry this week hosts a poignant exhibition of shoes, called In Their Footsteps. John Kelly, whose brother Michael was among those who lost their lives 46 years ago during the Bloody Sunday Civil Rights march, said: “These shoes were gathered during the island-wide In Their Footsteps campaign for truth, with over 200 pairs donated by families bereaved in the conflict and exhibited in Dublin, London and Belfast. This year we relaunch In Their Footsteps with a call for families to contribute to this ever-growing display, highlighting the lack of progress in historic cases.”
With many thanks to the: Belfast Telegraph for the origional story
Why ex-IRA bomber is wrong to take a uniform approach to PoW status
Former Provisional Shane Paul O’Doherty (pictured above) argued in this newspaper last week that republican inmates didn’t qualify as prisoners of war. Here, historian Dieter Reinisch says O’Doherty’s view is at odds with British Government policy throughout the 20th century
Shane Paul O’Doherty argued that “captured (IRA) combatants could never qualify as prisoners of war” because they “did not conduct military operations according to the laws and customs of war”.
He then goes on and uses an appeal by republicans to the European Court of Human Rights as evidence that the “entire republican movement – political and militant – was effectively recognising the jurisdiction of the international humanitarian laws and associated Geneva Conventions”.
However, one cannot take an isolated episode of the Troubles to explain the policy surrounding as controversial a term as “prisoners of war”.
The status of the prisoners, both republican and loyalist, is arguably one of the most controversial topics of Northern Ireland’s recent past.
The debate is politically loaded, as is O’Doherty’s article.
While he discusses a legal term, he falls into the trap of making a moral argument, hence, making use of a barbaric IRA attack and even the 1916 signatories to strengthen his argument.
Instead, I suggest a more sober look at the term “prisoner of war”.
In the context of the Troubles, the term “prisoners of war” is often used for particular political purposes and is, therefore, mystified.
In order to demystify the term, we need to ask what was meant by Irish republicans using this term and what did they want to achieve by using it.
As we answer these questions, we realise that republicans did not aim for “prisoner of war” status under the Geneva Convention, but for a status that distinguished them from ordinary criminal prisoners.
This status is usually referred to as “special category status”, or “political status”.
By demanding this status, republicans did not seek “prisoners of war” status under the Geneva Convention, but a moral distinction of their struggle from the crimes of criminal convicts.
British governments have granted exactly this status to republicans through various phases of history.
Starting with 1916, republicans suspected of participating in the Easter Rising were held in Frongoch internment camp under the same conditions as German First World War prisoners of war.
Following the outbreak of the Troubles and a hunger strike at Belfast’s Crumlin Road Gaol, again, special category status was granted (until March 1, 1976).
This status was eventually phased out and all prisoners arriving in the newly-built H-Blocks were treated as ordinary criminals, while those held in the Long Kesh camp retained their special status.
This led to the situation that merely a fence and a few yards separated members of the same paramilitary organisations enjoying special category status, on the one hand, and the Blanket protest and, eventually, hunger strikes in the fight to re-achieve this status on the other – even though both groups of prisoners were imprisoned for the same reasons, namely, paramilitary activities.
About a year after 10 republicans died on hunger strike for special status, the prisoners were gradually granted some of their demands, resulting in the fact that, in 1983, they had again achieved some form of special category status – this lasted until the closure of HMP Maze in 2000 and continues today in Maghaberry Prison.
In his new book, Sunningdale: The Search for Peace in Northern Ireland, Noel Dorr writes that when Philipp Woodfield, then Deputy Secretary of the Northern Ireland Office, met IRA representatives Daithi O Conaill and Gerry Adams on June 20, 1972, his response to their demand for “political status” of IRA prisoners was, “though unwilling to accept the term ‘political status’, (…) the substance of what they sought was already virtually the case” (pp 154-5).
The IRA delegation was happy with that and dropped this demand.
In sum, during various periods of the Troubles, British governments were willing to grant some sort of special status to republican prisoners. All these categories, no matter if it was before 1976, or after 1983, stopped short of the official “prisoner of war” status under the Geneva Convention.
Nonetheless, republicans were happy to accept it as long as it distinguished them from ordinary prisoners and, therefore, gave them moral justification for their struggle. Prisoner of war status is a flexible and fluid concept, on both sides of the Troubles.
Shane Paul O’Doherty tries to make a case that IRA prisoners should not be “entitled to claim the term ‘prisoners of war'”.
Instead, I argue that one can, indeed, make a case that might not entitle them to use the term under the Geneva Convention, but certainly the term “special category prisoners”.
In a recently published article in the Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law, Samantha A Caesar writes that the British Government should have continued to grant special category status to republican prisoners after 1975.
She writes: “A deeper look at international law and relations between Ireland and the United Kingdom during the late-1970s and early-1980s reveals that there is a strong case for treating the conflict in Northern Ireland as an international, rather than a non-international, conflict under international law. Therefore, whether the denial of PoW status to IRA prisoners during this time was lawful is questionable at best” (p326).
Moreover, by introducing internment and Diplock prosecutions, the British Government prosecuted republicans differently from ordinary prisoners; consequently, they should have allowed them to be treated differently inside prison, as well.
In the introduction to the volume Prisons, Terrorism and Extremism: Critical Issues in Management, Radicalisation and Reform, Professor Andrew Silke explains that “terrorism is not the same as other types of crime and terrorists are not typical criminals”.
According to Silke, the common characteristic of extremist offenders is firstly, the political dimension, which is not normally seen among criminal offenders; secondly, their offending is primarily a group phenomenon; and thirdly, these offenders rarely radicalise and act in isolation.
Analysing the UN framework, Silke concludes that, under this framework, most extremist prisoners can be “reasonably referred to as political prisoners, though, not surprisingly, most governments prefer to avoid this term out of fear that it might transfer some apparent legitimacy to the terrorists and their cause” (p5).
To conclude, the status of prisoners in Northern Ireland is a politically loaded topic – this applies to both republican and loyalist ex-prisoners. Over the past decades, the use of the term has been fluid and flexible on all sides of the conflict.
War is brutal and terrible things happen that would and should never happen in normal societies. Nonetheless, the debate on former paramilitary prisoners needs to be unchained from moral prejudices.
Only if we achieve a sober analysis of events can we learn from the past and move forward to the future.
Dieter Reinisch is a historian at the European University Institute in Florence and an editorial board member of the journal Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies, published by Florence University Press
With many thanks to the: Belfast Telegraph for the origional story.
Provisonal Sinn Féin endorse Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and MI5 operations in the Occupied Six Counties in the North.
Sinn Fein’s special convention on January 28 gave its backing to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the Northern Ireland criminal justice system.
The 900 or so delegates and 2,000 observers voted by 95 percent to “participate in local policing structures in the interests of justice,” and mandated the appointment of Sinn Fein representatives to the Northern Ireland Policing Board and District Policing Boards.
The decision, opposed only by Sinn Fein’s youth wing with a mere 20 votes, gives the Sinn Fein executive the right to participate in the North’s policing structures without further reference to the party’s membership. It follows a campaign by the leadership of the benefits of a Sinn Fein Minister of Justice, with control over the PSNI.
It means that the last obstacle, on the nationalist side, to reviving power-sharing in Northern Ireland between the nationalist Sinn Fein and the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), has been removed.
The vote’s significance was immediately grasped on both sides of the Atlantic as it removes the last vestige of equivocation over Sinn Fein’s support for the Northern Ireland capitalist state.
The London Times noted, “Irish republicans have served notice that they will work with British sovereignty in Ulster for what they obviously hope will only be a transitional period but which could and should last for many years to come.” Outgoing US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland Mitchell Reiss commended the leadership of Gerry Adams and called for the full implementation of the St. Andrews Agreement, designed to restore power sharing. Reiss also demanded that unionists support the new agreement.
Further endorsement of Sinn Fein from top police and intelligence echelons came from the so-called Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), whose members include a former CIA deputy director and a former deputy director of the Metropolitan Police.
The IMC stressed that, following its decision to disarm, the IRA has ceased all training, intelligence gathering and disbanded its paramilitary structures. “We are clear that the leadership of Sinn Fein and the republican movement as a whole remains firm in its commitment to the political strategy and continues to give appropriate instructions to the membership of the movement.”
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, with Ireland’s Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in tow, promptly announced that new elections for the Stormont Assembly would be held on March 7 “for the explicit purposes of endorsing the St. Andrew’s agreement and of electing the assembly that will form a power-sharing executive on March 26.”
The Northern Ireland Assembly set up as part of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which set out to end the longstanding war in the North by bringing Sinn Fein and the IRA into the framework of capitalist rule, has been suspended since 2002.
Following the suspension, the British government placed maximum pressure on Sinn Fein, partly in response to DUP demands, to abandon all extra-parliamentary activity.
In 2005, the murder of Catholic Robert McCartney and the raid on Belfast’s Northern Bank were utilised to press Sinn Fein towards its decision later that year to disarm the IRA and suspend all its activities. Nevertheless, subsequent efforts to revive the assembly have stumbled over Sinn Fein’s reservations over supporting the PSNI—the partially reformed replacement for the notorious Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which played such a key role in British imperialism’s occupation of the North. The PSNI is formally committed to recruiting as many Catholics as Protestants.
In the St. Andrews Agreement of October 2006, orchestrated by Blair and the US government, a framework was established to finally bring Sinn Fein and the DUP together. The new agreement set out a timetable for elections, pledged human rights and equality legislation, along with promises of a cash bonus in the form of a spending review. In return, local control of the PSNI should be agreed, with the intention of this being implemented by 2008.
As a further sweetener to former IRA activists, the government abolished the Assets Recovery Agency. Commentators noted that this would undoubtedly assist the Sinn Fein leadership in convincing former IRA units—particularly in border areas of South Armagh, where a lot of money has been made from smuggling—of the correctness of their policy.
In the weeks leading up to the Sinn Fein vote, two events revealed the real character of the Northern Ireland state to which Sinn Fein is now wedded.
The first was the publication of a report by Northern Ireland’s Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan. The Ombudsman role was established along with the Good Friday Agreement, with the intention of establishing some level of public confidence in the police complaints system. In 2003, O’Loan was asked by Raymond McCord to investigate complaints surrounding the circumstances in which his son, also Raymond McCord, had been killed.
O’Loan’s report was devastating. It revealed that in one corner of North Belfast and Newtonabbey serious evidence existed to link at least 10 murders, 10 attempted murders and a host of other criminal activities to an informant of the RUC Special Branch. Both Catholics and Protestants were targeted. Called “Informant 1” in O’Loan’s report, Mark Haddock, a known member of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, was named in the Irish parliament by Labour Party leader Pat Rabitte.
Between 1991 and as late as 2003, alongside his murderous activities, Haddock is alleged to have provided hundreds of pieces of information to Special Branch. In return, and as part of a sustained effort to control a loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) unit, Haddock received around £80,000, was repeatedly given assistance by Special Branch to keep him out of jail, allowed to keep a handgun, and assisted in his effort to remove rivals in the local drug trade.
“As a consequence of the practices of Special Branch,” notes O’Loan, “the UVF particularly, in North Belfast and Newtonabbey were consolidated and strengthened.”
It can be assumed that such Special Branch practices covered every area of Northern Ireland. O’Loan notes that as a result of her report, 24 percent of police informants have been discharged, either as criminals or for not providing any information. O’Loan did not comment on the corollary to this—that 76 percent of informants remain active.
In another significant development, Annex E of the St. Andrews Agreement also allowed for MI5 to take overall charge of national security arrangements in Northern Ireland, while continuing to run agents, in close collaboration with the PSNI.
MI5, the internal arm of the British intelligence services, has long played a bloody role in Northern Ireland. Throughout the dirty war, MI5’s agents and informants were at some level implicated in a number of the most notorious incidents, including the Kincora Boys Home scandal, the murder of civil rights lawyer Pat Finucane, the killing of Francis Notarantonio and the Omagh bombing, to name but a few.
Although there was much inter-agency feuding, MI5 had close working relations with RUC Special Branch, the British Army’s covert units, such as the Force Research Unit, and had a high level of insight and control over the conduct and trajectory of Britain’s counterinsurgency operations.
In recent years, the multiple murderer and deputy head of the IRA’s internal security, Freddie Scappaticci, was exposed as an MI5 agent, as was the IRA’s leading international and US contact Denis Donaldson. No serious commentator on Irish politics considers that the full extent of MI5 infiltration of all paramilitary groups, including the top levels of the IRA, has yet been fully exposed.
MI5 has repeatedly put every obstacle in the path of investigators and lawyers trying to unearth the truth, for example, of the events of Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, when 13 civil rights demonstrators were shot dead by the British Army.
Recently allegations have emerged that loyalist killer Torrens Knight was an MI5 agent. Knight was one of a squad of Ulster Defence Association gunmen responsible for the deaths of eight Protestants and Catholics in Greysteel in 1993.
While the British Army watchtowers and fortresses have largely been dismantled, a new headquarters is being built for MI5 in Palace Barracks, outside Belfast. According the Sunday Tribune, reports indicate that MI5 is actively recruiting members of the former RUC Special Branch disgraced in the O’Loan report.
Of MI5’s UK-wide budget, fully one third remains allocated to operations in Northern Ireland, although the new building is part of a UK-wide escalation of its role. According to the Belfast Telegraph, MI5 is developing a networked 10-building infrastructure for its 2,850 staff, including regional stations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Opposing Annex E, in November the constitutional nationalist Social Democratic Labour Party tabled an amendment to the Northern Ireland Bill, based on the St. Andrew’s Agreement, which would have provided the Police Ombudsman with powers to investigate joint operations between the PSNI and MI5.
For their part, Sinn Fein claimed to “reject any role for MI5 in Ireland or in civic policing.”
In response, last month, the Blair government assured Sinn Fein that MI5 in Ireland would be a “stand-alone” body, that security arrangements would be overseen by a Liberal Democrat peer, and that a liaison group would be set up between the PSNI and MI5. No PSNI officers would be seconded to, or under the control of, MI5.
Presented with this worthless assurance from the government that launched a bloodbath in Iraq on a fabricated pretext, Sinn Fein’s policing and justice spokesman, Gerry Kelly, was ecstatic. He proclaimed that Blair’s statement ensured that “MI5 have no part in policing in the North…. We have a PSNI which is not signed up to MI5 and which will hold them to account.
With many thanks to: Steve James, World Socialalist Web Site (WSWS) for the origional story
Máire Drumm murdered in her hospital bed.
On 28th October 1976, 28 years ago, Sinn Féin Vice President Máire Drumm was shot dead in her hospital bed.
Máire Drumm (née McAteer), was born in the townland of Killeen, South Armagh, on 22 October 1919 to a staunchly republican family. Máire’s mother had been active in the Tan War and the Civil War.
In 1940, Máire joined Sinn Féin in Dublin. In 1942, she moved to Belfast, which became her adopted city and she continued her republican activities. Every weekend, Máire would carry food parcels to the republican prisoners in Crumlin Road Jail and it was here that she met Jimmy Drumm, who she married in 1946.
When the IRA renewed the armed struggle in the late 1950s, Jimmy was again interned without trial from ’57 to ’61.
Máire became actively involved in the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s. She worked tirelessly to rehouse the thousands of nationalists forced from their homes by unionist/loyalist pogroms.
During her work as a Civil Rights activist, Máire emerged as one of the Republican Movement’s most gifted leaders and organisers. Máire was the first to warn that the British troops sent in as “peace keepers” were a force of occupation. Máire was a dynamic and inspirational speaker. Once, when addressing a rally in Derry after the shooting of two men from the city, Máire said:
“The people of Derry are up off their bended knees. For Christ sake stay up. People should not shout up the IRA, they should join the IRA.”
In 1972, Máire became Vice President of Sinn Féin. Due to their dedication to the republican struggle, Máire’s family was continuously harassed by the RUC, British Army and by loyalist intimidation. The British Army even constructed an observation post facing their home in Andersonstown. At one point, her husband and son were interned at the same time. Her husband, Jimmy became known as the most jailed republican in the Six Counties. Máire was also jailed twice for ‘seditious’ speeches, once along with her daughter.
In 1976, her eyesight began to fail and she was admitted for a cataract operation to the Mater Hospital, Belfast. On 28 October 1976, as Máire lay in her hospital bed, loyalist killers wearing doctors white coats walked into her room and shot her dead.
Máire Drumm, freedom fighter and voice of the people, was buried in Milltown Cemetery. One of her most famous quotes was:
“We must take no steps backward, our steps must be onward, for if we don’t, the martyrs that died for you, for me, for this country will haunt us forever.”
https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.jsAbout maire drumm https://eurofree3.wordpress.com/2016/07/09/maire-drumm-1919-1976/
With many thanks to: Easter Rising War of Independence and Irish Civil War History.
MARCH FOR JUSTICE 1972-2012 ( Still waiting for Justice To be Served ) from the Archives !
UPDATE ON COMMEMORATION MARCH 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF BLOODY SUNDAY
Some surviving former leaders of the civil rights movement will attend a Tea/Coffee evening in solidarity with the MARCH FOR JUSTICE organisers, which is likely to be on Thursday Nov.10th @ Crawford Square, Derry. Further details from usual contact details.
Civil Rights veterans tea/coffee SOLIDARITY EVENING with Bloody Sunday 2011 MARCH FOR JUSTICE – THURSDAY NOVEMBER 10TH commencing at 8pm @ our Crawford Square offices. Non-Nicra Vets wishing to assist the march organisers should make contact ASAP – R.S.V.P. via-Facebook messages, rights.civil@gmail.com 0r mobile 07783660181. “We shall Overcome-someday!
Please make contact with : Fionnbarra Ó Dochartaigh on 07783660181 – ASAP
seachranaidhe1 
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