Double standards at play in Gerry Adams arrest

Posted by Jim on May 3, 2014

By J O’Toole (for swp.ie)

In a conflict that generated horrific atrocities in abundance, few
delivered more grief to its victims than the murder of widowed
mother-of-ten Jean McConville in December 1972. Looking back more than
forty years later it is almost impossible to fathom the pain that such
atrocities inflicted on families and friends.

And yet the conflict in the North brought misery without end in the
early seventies — 15 civilians were killed in the UVF bombing of McGurk’s
Bar in Belfast in late 1971; British Army massacres in Belfast the same
year and in Derry in January 1972 took 11 and 14 lives respectively; and
a devastating IRA bombing at Claudy just a few months before
McConville’s abduction left 9 dead–and these were but the worst in a
long string of staggering atrocities that accompanied the outbreak of
war in the North.

Jean McConville — a Protestant in a mixed marraige — had moved to Divis in
the Lower Falls area after she and her husband were burnt out of East
Belfast by loyalists. After her abduction by the IRA, McConville’s
surviving family was broken up and her children scattered, some of them
taken into care.

Her son Michael insists that the RUC had information on the 32
year-old’s disappearance within two days, yet the police never attempted
to find her.
Although the British government have gone to extraordinary lengths to
resurrect the case over the past couple of years — pouring huge resources
into bringing a high-profile court case in the US to win access to
interview transcripts and, in the last few weeks, arresting high profile
veteran republicans, including most recently Sinn Fein president Gerry
Adams — the fact is they never even opened a file on McConville until
forced to do so by her family in 1995, almost a quarter century after
her death.

While there are few who will not sympathise with the McConvilles in
their search for the truth, many are understandably cynical about the
British government’s motivation in bringing a case now, within weeks of
Tory NI Secretary of State Teresa Villier’s announcement of a “fresh
approach” to the past that will focus on “the wrongdoing of
paramilitaries” and away from reckoning with the “activities of the
state.”

On one level there is nothing “fresh” or new in this:

David Cameron’s rejection of the call for an independent inquiry into
the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane is only the most well-known
attempt to bury the story of the state’s deep complicity in sectarian
murder, and the notion that state forces have come under some special
scrutiny in recent years is delusional. The new turn is a flagrant
attempt to draw a line under investigations into state terror, though
Villiers reserves the power to prosecute republicans and loyalists as
the needs of the ‘peace process’ dictate.

Facing “dozens of inquests” into Troubles-related killings and with a
string of High Court cases “by victims alleging state collusion in
murder,” London is looking for a way to shut down the search for truth,
not to expand it. It is the convergence of interests between the British
state and the most backward elements in Unionism–exposed for their
scuppering of the recent Haass talks–that explains Villiers’s
declaration.

Villiers’ announcement just a day before Adams’ arrest that she would
block an independent review into the 1972 murder by British paratroopers
of 11 unarmed civilians–including a mother of eight–in Ballymurphy
provides clear evidence of the double standards at play.

“When you will stop harbouring murderers in the ranks of the British
Army?” John Teggart, speaking for their families, asked of David
Cameron. “Never” would be Cameron’s response if he were speaking
honestly, and in this he has the full backing of the British and Irish
establishments. All of this comes within days of the grand hooley at the
Queen’s residence in London, after all, when the Irish elite of all
political stripes–including Sinn Fein–fell over themselves in begging
London’s forgiveness for having once intruded on imperial prerogatives.

In the aftermath of Villiers announcement that there would be no review
of the Ballymurphy murders, Enda Kenny expressed his “disappointment”
with the decision. Such a feeble response is to be expected from the
head of a state which has never pressed the British government to
release its files on the 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings, the worst single
atrocity of the Troubles–in which 34 civilians were killed and more than
300 injured in an operation described by an Oireachtas committee as “an
act of international terrorism colluded in by British Security Forces.”

The southern establishment also has a stake in seeing Adams and Sinn
Fein taken down. They face an electoral upheaval as a huge sentiment of
disgust with the Troika parties of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour
unfolds. Up to now Sinn Fein has been the main beneficiary, topping two
out of the three Euro seat polls. A surge to Sinn Fein would not
de-stabilise the state in itself and some of the more perceptive
establishment figures know that they can be eventually co-opted into a
coalition with Fianna Fail and neutered.

By contrast, not a single soldier has ever been identified, let alone
prosecuted for the murder of 11 unarmed civilians in Ballymurphy in 1971
or 14 in Derry early the following year. In some cases Army officers who
presided over the slaughter or who have been proven to have lied through
their teeth were decorated and promoted, and went on to serve out long
careers overseeing counterinsurgency in Iraq and elsewhere. In many
cases involving allegations of RUC collusion, important files have been
burned or gone missing, while veterans of the sectarian force have found
their way back into paid employment in the ‘reformed’ PSNI–even as
‘investigators’ on cases going back to the period of their tenure in the
RUC.

But the break-up of the cosy political club that has dominated Irish
politics since the foundation of the state would still create a major
problem. It would raise the expectations of working people and help
remove the thick cloud of fatalism that has demobilised them. If FF, FG
and Labour were destroyed at the polls, the confidence to fight water
charges and spread the example of resistance from Cork would grow. Enda
Kenny and the entire establishment will gloat over Adams’ arrest not
because they feel any particular sympathy for the McConvilles, but
because it diminishes the threat of an electoral thrashing they so
richly deserve.

Villiers’ call for a “proportionate” focus on paramilitaries reinforces
Unionist complaints that too much attention has been paid to state
violence, but this represents an obscene distortion of the record. For
more than a quarter century the full power of the state was applied to
suppressing what was, in effect, a popular nationalist insurgency in the
North. In the process tens of thousands of young men and women were
jailed and interned, and substantial numbers of them tortured or killed,
in an effort to crush resistance and shore up a repressive, sectarian
state.

The state response to the IRA’s horrific 1978 bombing of the La Mon
hotel (in which 12 people died and dozens suffered severe burns) stands
in sharp contrast, for example, to the official response to Bloody
Sunday. In the immediate aftermath of the La Mon atrocity the RUC
assigned a team of 100 detectives to the case; 25 Republicans were
rounded up for questioning in the days afterward, including Adams. Two
were charged and one individual was sentenced to twelve life sentences.
The British state’s selective approach to the past is not just about
maintaining its control over a staggering peace process that requires
permanent life support in order to survive. The kind of stability that
they seek to preside over for Northern Ireland requires a rendering of
the past that casts them as a neutral party presiding over warring
tribes, and in many ways it is Sinn Fein’s complicity in this charade
that has allowed them to get away with it. If all of this is now coming
back to bite Adams and the SF leadership, they can hardly claim to be
shocked that the state they now help to administer has reverted to a
familiar routine. McGuinness now complains about ‘dark forces’ in the
PSNI, but they did not suddenly appear this week.

The sharp contest over what sparked thirty years of war and over who
will be prosecuted and who will be given a free pass for atrocities
committed during the Troubles is not only about embedding a particular
rendering of the recent conflict that exonerates the state. It is also
about who will shape the future. Regardless of whether the McConvilles
get the answers they deserve over the coming months, the chances of
getting a full and honest accounting of the recent past through a
process overseen by a British government up to its neck in perpetrating
violence are nil. That will only come in the course of a fundamental
challenge to the establishment north and south.