WHY? That’s the question which will remain unanswered if the British government’s legacy bill becomes law and effectively offers an amnesty for those involved in the Troubles.
While opponents of the bill accurately argue that it will deny justice by concealing who did what, where and when, a more useful question to ask is why they did it.
For example, this week’s BBC programme on the 14 hooded internees explored how, when and where they were tortured, but not why.
Former army commanders explained the need to obtain information about the emerging Provisional IRA.
I knew two of the hooded men. They had no useful information because neither had any interest in the PIRA. Indeed, one of them, Paddy Joe McClean, had been chair of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, an organisation which the PIRA opposed.
A man of immense integrity and humanity, the police later told him he was arrested because, as NICRA chairman, people trusted him and so he must have been in contact with "IRA men”. (Only Britain could regard being trustworthy as a crime, which should be punished by arrest, indefinite imprisonment and torture.)
There is no evidence that any of the other 12 had any information either. Why did the British seek information from them?
Some suggest that the RUC Special Branch were ill-informed, because many new PIRA members were not from traditional republican families. Instead, the Special Branch relied for intelligence on observing civil rights marches. (We got to recognise many of them. They were the well dressed ones not marching.)
While there is some truth in this theory, the random selection of torture victims prompts a different explanation: torture was simply part of Britain’s use of the north as a laboratory for military experiments, including psychological warfare. They were tortured largely to assess the physical and mental effects on its victims. The 14 men (and others) were human guinea pigs.
That same failure to explain hangs over other British atrocities. The Saville inquiry told us that the Bloody Sunday victims were innocent. We knew that. It did not tell us why they were shot. The reason was to remove the civil rights movement from the streets and allow the army to engage in an all-out war with the IRA.
A coroner’s inquest revealed that the Ballymurphy massacre victims were innocent, but we knew that too. No-one explained why they were killed. It was presumably to terrorise the civilian population. Only when we know why, can we understand who gave the orders.
All other groups involved in the violence must also explain what they did. Why did the IRA kill Jean McConville, a widowed mother-of-10, and deny her a Christian burial? If, as they claim, she was in contact with the army, why is it now appropriate for SF leaders to mix with the royal commander-in-chief of that same army?
Why is SF protesting against an amnesty for British soldiers when the IRA has an amnesty, as former Dublin justice minister Michael McDowell has revealed? Why did SF write to Tony Blair arguing that it was in the public interest that no-one should be prosecuted for pre-1998 crimes?
Why was there state collusion between the RUC/army and loyalist paramilitaries to kill Catholics? Why did the RUC return one of the guns to the UDA which was used in the mass shooting at Sean Graham’s?
The PSNI’s Historical Inquiries Team (2005-2014) had the potential to uncover much of what Britain’s legacy bill is trying to hide. Why was it disbanded? Asking who, what, when and where merely seeks to describe what happened. Asking why allows us to move beyond description to explanation.
Britain’s legacy bill is designed to absolve all the organisations which were involved in the Troubles, while disregarding the eternal difficulty this will create for the friends and families of their victims. In doing that, they intend to deny us an explanation of what happened. Why?
