The British government has refused to apologise for its role in the Troubles, and like some low-life criminal in a television crime story has, in effect, adopted a policy of “no comment”.
Geoff Bell
Geoff Bell, executive member of Labour for Irish Unity, writes about the significance of the Kenova report and why it will be hard for both the Tories and Labour to ignore.
Last week saw the publication of the Kenova report into one aspect of British state violence, criminality, and murder in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. This centred on the activities of “Stakeknife”, the British agent who headed the IRA’s unit detecting, judging, and in many cases killing alleged informers.
Kenova’s main author, Jon Boutcher, now head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, concludes that the British state was complicit and at some levels directed this criminality. And, moreover, it has attempted to cover it up ever since. Among his many findings were that “Stakeknife” and other British “agents” killed alleged informers in the IRA to protect themselves, killed each other, allowed murders to happen when they could have been prevented, and that the police and Crown Prosecution Service refused to investigate or charge those who did all this.
Boutcher also says that doing this was counter- productive: Stakeknife killed more than he saved.
Those who promoted and carried out these actions were the British Army-based Forces Research Unit (FRU), often working with MI5, but the responsibility does not just lie with them. Irish News columnist Brian Feeney has written: “The important point here is that Conservative politicians right up to cabinet level knew exactly what was going on here, were briefed on it and sanctioned it. Northern secretaries received regular detailed security updates. It’s not as if they didn’t know about allegations of collusion and IRA killings of alleged agents. The media was full of such stories. Admittedly the role of English politicians is not within Kenova’s terms of reference, but their connivance at the behaviour of the British army and MI5 can’t be ignored.”.
Kenova reports that some British politicians, spy-catchers, and Army leaders deny such connivance. But a former Commanding Officer of the FRU told Boutcher that “everything it did was done with MI5’s knowledge and consent.” And Boutcher also reports that when a senior policeman who was concerned about the apparent criminality of agents approached Margaret Thatcher asking for her government to establish a code of behaviour for such individuals, she refused to do so.
Indeed, Boutcher says that successive governments have orchestrated the subsequent cover-ups of such behaviour. They have encouraged security personnel neither to confirm nor deny collusion with the loyalist murder gangs when challenged in court. They denied Kenova and similar inquiries access to relevant documentation. They destroyed other evidence. They pointedly refused to put their killer agents on trial, including Stakeknife himself, who is now dead. All of this Kenova exposes and criticises.
Now Kenova has called upon both the British government and the IRA to apologise to the victims of these policies. Sinn Fein, on behalf of the Irish Republican movement, has apologised to all Troubles victims. The British government has refused to do so, and like some low-life criminal in a television crime story has, in effect, adopted a policy of “no comment”.
What else does Kenova recommend?
They want the government to establish an independent framework and apparatus for investigating Northern Ireland legacy cases. This should have the right to call witnesses. They want to subject all public authorities to an unqualified and enforceable legal obligation to cooperate with and disclose information and records to those charged with conducting Northern Ireland legacy investigations under a new structure.
Boutcher also calls for a review of “neither comment or deny” practices by British security personal appearing in court or inquests, and to “review the security classification of previous Northern Ireland legacy reports in order that their contents and (at the very least) their principal conclusions and recommendations can be declassified and made public.”
These proposals are noticeably absent from the government’s present legacy proposals. These are now due to be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought by the Irish Government.
Kenova’s proposals lack how to achieve political accountability for the type of practices he describes. Boutcher is also repeatedly and fiercely critical of the IRA. This might prove in his own mind that he is thus qualified to criticise some in the British security machine, but it shows he has little understanding of why many in the Catholic working class community joined the IRA in the first place. His potted history of the Troubles makes mistakes and is very selective. He does not even mention the Army imposed Belfast curfew of May 1970, Bloody Sunday or the Andersonstown murders of civilians by British soldiers. He does not acknowledge that such horrors drove people into the IRA. He says a “majority” of those originally interned in the early years of the Troubles were nationalists – in fact all were.
Because he often writes with this unionist ink it makes it more difficulty for the Tories or the next Labour government to dismiss his findings and recommendations. The problem is that if the past experiences he describes are anything to go by, this is exactly what they will do.
- Geoff Bell is an executive member of Labour for Irish Unity and the author The Twilight of Unionism – you can order a copy from Verso book here.
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