Opinion

Brian Feeney: History shows British efforts to hide legacy truth will be futile

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

The Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen), northwest of Madrid where thousands of victims in the 1936-1939 Spanish civil war were buried along with dictator General Franco's remains. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File).
The Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen), northwest of Madrid where thousands of victims in the 1936-1939 Spanish civil war were buried along with dictator General Franco's remains. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File). The Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen), northwest of Madrid where thousands of victims in the 1936-1939 Spanish civil war were buried along with dictator General Franco's remains. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File).

Apparently Britain’s new legislation to cover up what its troops and security services did in the north during the Troubles has been finally agreed by Johnson’s talentless Cabinet of nodding dogs and is ready to be presented next year.

It won’t work. Not because there will be interminable legal challenges ending in the European Court of Human Rights or because people won’t comply with the provisions of the stupid information retrieval scheme. It won’t work because these types of plans never work. Yes, of course a British government can bury the truth; they have repeatedly, but it’s always exhumed. Read Ian Cobain’s The History Thieves. Read Caroline Elkins books on concentration camps, torture and murder in Kenya. The colonial officials thought they’d got away with it. They always do. Then suddenly out of left field it rears up and they’re exposed as torturers, killers and liars. We tend to think this place is special and this repulsive British government’s bad faith unique. Far from it.

Caroline Elkins worked for years on Britain’s appalling policies in Kenya to suppress the liberation struggle the Kikuyu led in the 1950s which the British called the Mau Mau rebellion. Eventually in 2011 the case of four victims claiming compensation for imprisonment, torture and mutilation came to court in London. For years Elkins had been searching unsuccessfully for documentary proof of mistreatment aware that Britain had spirited away files extending to over 100 feet of shelving when they left Kenya in 1963. What came out in court flabbergasted not only Elkins, but people in all Britain’s former colonies.

David Cameron’s government admitted there is a high security storage depository at Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire shared by the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6. It contained thousands of files stolen not just from Kenya but from 36 other colonies. Stacked vertically they would have stood 200 metres high. They contained incriminating letters such as the instruction from the British attorney-general for Kenya warning the proconsul that abuse of Mau Mau suspects should remain ‘legal’ (sic) and therefore they should only be beaten on the upper body avoiding “vulnerable parts of the body, particularly the spleen, liver or kidneys”. Other documents detailed how detainees had been beaten to death, burned alive and mutilated. In 2013 the Foreign Secretary William Hague announced compensation for 5,228 Kenyans. It took just over fifty years.

Other places have tried other methods of concealment. Spain is the best example. After Franco’s death in 1975 the country’s political parties agreed on a Pact of Forgetting followed by an Amnesty Law in 1977 as a gesture of reconciliation with a view of the future. However, it was very one-sided because Franco’s fascists had continued to imprison and kill thousands of people for years after the end of the Civil War in 1939. The pact lasted until 2000 when people began to demand exhumation of the bodies of relatives buried in mass graves by Franco’s goons. They could by then be identified with DNA.

In 2004 the socialist government passed the Historical Memory Law invalidating trials in the Franco period and some laws too. The UN has repeatedly condemned the Amnesty Law. In recent years more and more unmarked graves have been examined. In 2019 Franco’s body was removed from its elaborate mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen which glorified the fascist era. The prime minister Pedro Sanchez said it was an act of national reconciliation. He added: "Modern Spain is the product of forgiveness, but it can't be the product of forgetfulness."

The point this demonstrates is not only the stupidity of the current British plans but their futility. It took the Kenyans 50 years. The Spanish efforts to reveal the wrongs of the past deal with over 80 years ago. It never goes away nor can be wished away. It’s small consolation to families of victims here today, but the truth will out. It always does.